Blame It On The Moon
by etraytin
Summary: An invitation to a Congressional soiree prompts a long-overdue discussion between Josh and Donna over a certain night and a certain red dress.


Author's Note: Today's story is partially in response to a prompt from BoldChoicesMe asking for "does Donna keep the red dress? Or what might happen when she goes to return it?" It is also partially in response to this week's episode of The West Wing Weekly podcast, which was about The Portland Trip, and which infuriated me to the point where I could not finish listening. (Too bad, because it is usually excellent.) But anybody who has seen the entire series and who watches that episode and doesn't understand what is going on with Josh and Donna in their scenes just isn't paying attention at all.

Today's story is also a bit of a writing exercise, since pretty much everything I've written to this point in the fandom has been from a close third-person perspective set in one character's point of view, and for today I dropped back to a distant third. It was kind of interesting to try. Hope you enjoy, feedback is always welcome! Also, check at the bottom of this story for the reader poll.

…...

"It's a Congressional cocktail party, Donna," Josh complained, caroming around the corner of the bullpen at full speed, narrowly missing a couple of interns too green to get out of the way. "There's gonna be a narrow window of about thirty minutes between the time people actually bother to show up and when they're too drunk to negotiate with, and ninety minutes on each side of preparation and babysitting!"

Donna was hot on his heels, clutching a brace of folders in one arm and keeping an eye out to make sure her boss didn't cause too much chaos on the way to his office. "You're just mad because last time Congressman McLaren threw up on you."

"He threw up all over my legs!" Josh reminded her stridently. "I had to throw away my shoes!"

"Which bothers you because usually you get to be the one throwing up," Donna countered dryly as they swung into Operations.

"Hey, I have never once thrown up on a Congressman," Josh protested. "They could do me the same courtesy."

"You've come pretty damn close. Remember Toby's birthday party when you tried to dance with Andi?"

"That was on the campaign!" he protested. "Campaigns are like college, or Vegas. You do stuff you wouldn't do otherwise, and then everybody forgets about it. Forgetting about it being the key words there."

"I dunno," Donna mused, dropping the folders on her desk and checking her computer. "You called me a buzzkill and vomited into my purse when I sidelined you that time, it was pretty memorable."

"Hey, I bought you a new purse," Josh shot back defensively.

"You gave me thirty dollars and a twenty-minute window at Macy's to find a replacement," she reminded him implacably, "because you'd have to do financial disclosures after we got to the White House. I had to get new makeup too, and retake the driver's test."

"That part was definitely not my fault."

"It really was."

"You needed a DC license anyway."

"They made me bring in my birth certificate and retake the test because my old license was so mangled. And do you know why it was mangled, Joshua?"

He waved a hand to dismiss the conversation, heading across the hall to his office. "Ancient history!"

"It was three and a half years ago!"

"That's an eternity in politics," he assured her. "Anyway, even if that wasn't ancient history and totally unfair to even bring up because it was on the campaign trail, all that serves to do is illustrate why I shouldn't have to go, and why, since I can't get out of it, you have to come with me."

"I don't want to go," she reminded him, following him into his office with the afternoon schedule. "Take Amy."

"I don't want to take Amy."

"She's your girlfriend, this is a social event, why wouldn't you want to take her?"

Josh thudded into his seat without so much as looking, then began rooting through his desk drawers. "If I take Amy, she'll be working the room for her own things, not my thing. I need you there to funnel people my way and hang onto them till I'm ready to talk to them. You know the drill."

Donna leaned against the doorframe. "And as much fun as that sounds, I still can't go. The dress code is red, white or blue for women. My cocktail length dresses are green and peach."

He looked up at her, furrowed his brow. "Wear that red thing, the one from last year. You wore it after work that one time."

Her eyes narrowed slightly. "I'm surprised you remember that one. You know I didn't keep it."

Josh blinked. "You didn't? But it looked great on you. I told you that you should buy it and everything."

That drew a smirk from her. "It was a five hundred dollar dress, Josh. I also wanted to pay my rent that month. Besides, I didn't really want any reminders of that night cluttering up my closet."

"Oh yeah." Humor curled over his features. "You were still on nightly gomer patrol back then. I can't even remember that guy's name."

"Neither can I," she assured him coolly. "It was you I didn't want to remember."

"Me?" Now he just looked confused. "I told you you looked great!"

"You called me pathetic," she reminded him flatly. "You made fun of me for going on dates with losers because my pathetic desire to be coupled drowned out my almost-nonexistent sense of self-worth. And you made me come back to work for no reason, just so you could be sure that even if I were having a good time, I'd have to cut it short and be there for you. Needless to say, it wasn't Tad or Ted or whoever that I was thinking about for the rest of the night."

Josh had already opened his mouth, ready to jump to his own defense, but he deflated as she spoke, looking down at his hands on the desk blotter. "I don't... I don't remember that part," he confessed.

Now Donna deflated a little as well, leaning her head against the doorframe. "I kind of suspected you didn't," she told him. "You were starting to do a lot of weird things around then, forgetting things, being mean for no reason. I was worried about you, when you weren't pissing me off."

"You worried about me," he said slowly. "You went to Leo and got him to call Stanley."

"Not soon enough," she admitted, looking away. "I was too mad at first to really be worried. 'How dare you treat me like that, I thought we were friends,' and all that. I thought you'd changed, but I didn't realize that you really weren't yourself. If I'd seen it earlier, maybe things wouldn't've gotten so bad." She absently rubbed her thumb over the heel of her own hand, right where he'd cut himself.

"None of that was your fault," he said immediately, forcefully. "You took care of me for months and I never really even thanked you properly, but then we were back at work and everything was so busy and so loud and there was no time for anything. You were the one thing that didn't... that didn't chafe against my skin, and I remember not knowing what I would do without you." Josh dropped his head nearly to the desk and scrubbed both his hands through his hair. He looked up at her without raising his head. "Did I really call you pathetic?" he asked quietly.

"Yes," she answered, just as softly.

"Well, I was wrong," he told her. "It was a shitty thing to say at all, but it was wrong, too. You are the furthest thing from pathetic, and nobody should ever tell you otherwise."

Now she smiled just a little, the corners of her lips quirking up. "I know," she assured him. "But it's still nice to hear."

He ran his hand through his hair one more time, leaving most of it sticking straight up. "Look, if you really don't want to go to this thing, I won't make you do it. I'll figure something out, maybe browbeat Sam into rounding up Congressmen for me." He smiled at her then, not a political smile or the habitual smirk, but a genuine one. "But if you do want to come, I swear to god I won't say a word about where you got the dress, or who you want to talk to, or anything else that's none of my business. They've got a live jazz ensemble coming in, you might have fun."

"I might have fun just watching you try and bite your tongue all night," she countered, but she was smiling too now. "I'll think about it."

"Okay." He nodded. "So what's on the schedule for this afternoon?"

…...

Well, it's been 38 days now, and my amazing, stupendous, injudicious West-Wing-Fic-a-Day-Till-The-Election has only four days left! I'm well over 100k words into the project by now, but by this time next week, it'll all be over!

My readers on Tumblr, AO3 and have been awesome this month about sending me prompts, sometimes lots of prompts, and I have used them freely. But now that I am coming down to the wire, I'd like to take some special requests, if people have any, for the last few days.

Possibilities include:  
Another chapter of Such A Winter's Day  
Another chapter of shorter continuing fics like Achieving Mediocrity, Wheels Still in Spin, or Summer of '68  
Additional chapters of fics that are currently stand-alone like Ourselves and Immortality, Equilibrium, Home Away from Home, Cinderella Story, or Closure  
Prompts that you are really super-interested in and want really badly (even if you've sent them to me before)

I'm interested in knowing what people want to read, not just for the next five days, but also because I don't plan on stopping completely even when I'm not churning out one thing a day anymore. So if you've got something, now's the time. What do you want?


End file.
